Now, a team led by Maureen Hanson from Cornell University has announced a successful generation of tobacco plants (Nicotiana tabacum, a common model for genetic studies) with Rubisco from a blue-green algae, Synechococcus elongatus. By replacing the gene for the carbon-fixing enzyme in tobacco plants with two genes for the cyanobacterial version, their engineered plants (pictured above and below) perform photosynthesis and have higher rates of CO2 turnover than plants with the native version of the enzyme -- when grown in an elevated CO2 environment.